Predominantly associated with the educational or the exotic in the United
States, the documentary film occupies a very different place in the cinema
of revolutionary Cuba. Between 90 and 95 percent of the films produced
under the revolution have been documentaries, and the man most responsible
for the international stature of Cuban documentary cinema is Santiago
Alvarez.

As the director of the weekly "Latin American Newsreel"
produced by the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), Alvarez directed an enormous
number of newsreels as well as many other short and feature-length
documentaries. Never having formally studied cinema, he became a filmmaker
by "handling millions of feet of film." Alvarez felt himself
to be a journalist, but believed that cinematic journalism should have a
permanence beyond simple reportage. To achieve such transcendency,
Alvarez's newsreels are typically monothematic and integrated, with
the result that they appear more like individual documentary films than
the sort of generalized news reporting normally associated with newsreels.

The dominant characteristic of Alvarez's style is the
extraordinarily rhythmic blend of visual and audio forms. Alvarez utilized
everything at hand to convey his message: live and historical documentary
footage, still photos, bits from TV programs and fiction films, animation,
and an incredible range of audio accompaniment. Believing that "50
percent of the value of a film is in the soundtrack," Alvarez mixed
rock, classical, and tropical music, sound effects, participant
narration—even silence—into the furious pace of his visual
images. For Alvarez, cinema had its own language, different from that of
television or of radio, and the essence of this language is montage.

Alvarez's documentaries focus on both national and international
themes. For example,
Ciclon
is an early newsreel on the effects of hurricane Flora in Cuba. Although
it lacks the elaborate visual montage for which Alvarez later became
famous, the film shows great skill in the use of sound. There is no verbal
narration, and the track is limited to the source sound of trucks and
helicopters, and the organ music which eerily punctuates the scenes of
caring for the wounded and burying the dead.

Now
, a short dealing with racism in the United States and edited to the
rhythm of Lena Horne's song, shows the master at his best in
working with still photographs. Particularly effective is a sequence in
which Alvarez cuts between the chained hands of arrested blacks and the
linked hands of protestors to suggest a dynamic of collective struggle in
which people are seen not only as products of their circumstances, but as
historical actors capable of changing their circumstances. Here, Alvarez
fuses ideology and art by making graphic the third of Marx's
"Theses on Feuerbach." Alvarez's tribute to Che
Guevara,
Hasta la victoria siempre
, deals with much the same concept. He begins with a series of beautifully
shot stills of poverty in the Altiplano. Then, following footage of Che
speaking in the Sierra Maestra of Cuba, he dissolves a still of Che into a
still of a Gulf Oil Company camp in Bolivia. Through this technique he
links the earlier struggle in Cuba with the later guerrilla war in the
Andes.

One of the finest examples of Alvarez's work is
79 Springtimes
, a beautifully controlled montage on Ho Chi Minh's life and death.
He opens the short by ironically mixing elapsed-time photography of
flowers opening with slow-motion footage of bombs falling from United
States planes. He goes on to cut between scenes of United States
atrocities in Vietnam and protest marches in the U.S., visually
depicting the position that the real enemy is not the people of the U.S.,
but the ruling class and its mercenaries. In the final sequence, Alvarez
uses what seems to be every available visual effect—torn and burned
strips of film, film frames, bits of paper—to create an incredible
animated montage. The soundtrack underscores the visual dynamic with music
and poems by Ho Chi Minh and Jose Martí.

Even since his death in 1998, Alvarez continues to be thought of as one of
the foremost documentary filmmakers in Latin America, although some
consider his earlier short films to be superior to the later and longer
works. This may result from the fact that in the earlier films the line
between heroes (Che, Ho Chi Minh) and villains (U.S. imperialism and
racism) was more clearly drawn, while his later works reflected the
international compromises with the Soviet Union and reformist Latin
American governments that have been required of the Cuban revolution.
Nonetheless, Alvarez persisted in his indefatigable quest for an
"audacious and constantly renewed optic."

—John Mraz

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